With the approach of another mid-life birthday in the peak of bloom season, of course I’m considering bucket-list plants. What do I want to grow and why put it off for another season?
There are so many lovely plants in my landscape, and the maturity after more than a decade is thrilling. Yet I also want something new. It isn’t as interesting to take photos of the same plants in the same place year after year. I’m at the point of tinkering and editing in the main flowerbeds, and there are other things to attend to before adding plants. But still, I want more. Here is my version of the dream garden.
Willows
Willows are keystone species: Not only do they have interesting foliage and gorgeous bark, they attract insects, which feed birds. There are species available for most sites, from shrubs to trees. Many prefer consistently moist soil but can handle average conditions. My dream list includes the pussy willow (Salix discolor) for its fuzzy catkins in spring, and the silky willow (Salix sericea) for its silvery leaves.
A micro-forest
This is a technique rather than a plant. I need a few weekends to plan and plant a 10-foot-by-10-foot plot using the Miyawaki method, named for Akira Miyawaki, a Japanese botanist who created dense, biodiverse plantings with climax species that become mini-forests. He describes this in his book, The Healing Power of Forests — The Philosophy Behind Restoring Earth’s Balance with Native Trees, written with Elgene Box.
As the planet heats up, forests have cooling effects and support insects, birds and wildlife. By closely interplanting as many as 40 species of trees, shrubs and perennials, Miyawaki’s method has been shown to achieve faster growth from the force of competition, with few inputs required after the first few years.
Swales
A contoured landscape is a resilient landscape. This underutilized design can direct, absorb and retain water, that most important resource. If you’re managing your yard for too much water, add swales. If you’re managing your yard for too little water, add swales. I imagine my contours with lovely sedges that flow over the soft hills and valleys.
Those cool trees on social media
As a consumer of all things plant-related on the internet, I’m drawn in by accounts with images and details about all of the amazing and unusual features of trees and plants. The baobab tree, native to the African savannah, is an example. Known as the “tree of life,” some are 3,000 years old. It’s epic in the ways it interacts with people, animals and within ecosystems.
An orchard
My orchard would be full of paw paw trees, crabapple, berries for my daughter (so we don’t have to keep pretending to recycle the plastic grocery store containers), several types of pears, cherries and plums. That would be a good start. I would use hybrids and cultivars and enjoy a season-long harvest of delicious fruit and share a good portion with the birds.
How to conclude? One of everything, please. If I expanded beyond plants that grow in the Hudson Valley, I would take inspiration from Vita Sackville-West and the Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent, England, which I hope to visit. I would aspire to a boreal forest like the one that Diana Beresford-Kroeger tends in Canada. Her mission is to map the global forest and preserve every species in a seed bank.
I’ll end with a simple vision of a stand of trilliums growing in spring beneath oaks, white pine, maple and birch, surrounded by dried leaves and other spring ephemeral flowers. I’ve never seen a trillium during a walk in the woods and it would be such a lovely sight.
Send your list of bucket-list plants to [email protected]. I’ll organize the responses for a future column.
